PHiLOSOPHY
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LiFE blog

The publication of Teach Yourself Humanism has been delayed by a short while, for the many itching for it like a new volume of Harry Potter. (I know you're out there somewhere.)

The reason is a good one. Spot the difference between the old and new covers - left and right - below.

I've not been down to Canterbury, to get a hands on feel for the Lambeth Conference. Beneath the headlines, there are no doubt many humane and humbling encounters being experienced by participants. But the headlines do seem to be taking a nosedive.

Yesterday, the Archbishop of Sudan called for his fellow American and openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, to resign. He spoke of the difficulty gay bishops and blessings causes him in his war torn country. 'We are called infidel by the Islamic world,' he said. 'Immediately it gives them the way out to tell the other people, these people are evil and they can even harm our people more.'

This is no doubt a serious charge. That recognised, it clearly isn't the case that Robinson is the cause of strife in Sudan. Rather, his name has become a slogan within a much larger discourse of hate. If Robinson did resign, you can bet your bottom dollar there are other sticks that Muslims in that place would pick up to beat the 'infidel'.

Moreover, homophobia kills many too. As a reminder of this, Robinson is at Canterbury, if not at Lambeth, accompanied by body guards and wearing a bulletproof vest.

In short, two evils do not make a good: ostracising a gay bishop to tackle religious violence is not a recipe for peace. Difficult though it is, the only hope must be to keep firmly focused on what you believe to be true - or, as one would hope a Christian should say, on what you believe to be godly. Violence is not godly. Homophobia is not godly. Gene Robinson should stay.

Most exhibitions of the great from the past are impersonal affairs. There are statues, coins, plinths and papyrus fragments. They leave you interested but cold.

But the statues, coins, plinths and fragments that make up the British Museum's superb Hadrian: Life, Love, Legacy summer exhibition feel alive with the spirit of the great emperor himself. That said, it is still hard to make out the person.

The sense of presence is helped by the fact that you enter the exhibition beneath the fabulous dome of the round reading room, a building that is a direct descendent of Hadrian's masterpiece, the Rome Pantheon. You are greeted by what is surely the star piece of the show, a monumental head - as above. Less than a year ago it was still in the ground at Sagalassos, Turkey. This is first time it has been seen in public anywhere.

The sense of connection with Hadrian deepens when you hear that one of his first acts as emperor was to withdraw from an unwinnable conflict in what is now Iraq. (I saw David Aaronovitch at the press preview this morning, a British columnist and long-standing supporter of the contemporary war: my bet is on his next comment protesting at that parallel.) Indeed, the conflicts that Hadrian had to deal with are all in the same parts of the world as the conflicts our leaders today must handle. The parallels are quite explicit.

Then there is the earlobe crease that Hadrian had, clear in nearly all the busts of him. (It's just in the shadow of the photo I took above, though I like this head since it seems more personal than many of the stylized images, what with its thin lips and slight frown.) Such a marking is associated with congenital heart disease, and probably reveals how he died. Seeing the crease evokes sympathy for the man, deepens the sense of his humanity, and reminds you that even the great are dust and shall return to dust. This is the museum exhibition as religious experience, a trademark of the British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor.

Was Hadrian a thinker, even a philosopher? He would have met philosophers throughout his life, including Epictetus, Secundus the Silent and Herodes Atticus, the Sophist. The exhibition questions the philsophical credentials of the man, though, for all his undoubted aesthetic and architectural ability and taste.

The dark side of imperial rule is very evident too. There are objects belonging to Jews who undoubtedly died when Hadrian put down the Jewish Revolt of 133-135 CE. One is a papyrus inscribed with an order directly from Simon Bar Kokhba, though if a freedom fighter he was no pussy-cat. The threat of severe punishment to his supporters for disobeying him is underlined no fewer than three times in what is only a handful of words.

There is a section devoted to Hadrian's devotion to Antinous, including the statue above showing the deified Antinous as Aristaios (notice the full lips and large nipples). Strangely, though arguably the most personal part of Hadrian's life that we know about, this is perhaps the least moving part of the exhibition. There is also a note on how homosexual relationships were perfectly acceptable in ancient society, so long as the older male, or erastes, remained active over the passive youth, or eromenos. This economy of love is, though, today seriously questioned.

Towards the end, you come to a short excerpt from Hadrian's Autobiography, written on the only surviving fragment. It looks like a writing exercise with Hadrian's text being copied by a student, a sign of how widespread the document circulated in the second century, though now all but lost.

And it ends with the words from a poem the emperor penned, a suitably melancholic note:

Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer, Body's guest and companion, To what places will you set out now? To darkling, cold and gloomy ones - And you won't be making your usual jokes.

Over the weekend, I was reviewing Radical Alterity by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume for the TLS. One bit that didn't get in was Baudrillard's discussion of Todorov's categories of voyagers. It's illuminating and entertaining.

So with the summer upon us, and holidays in prospect, which are you?

1. The Assimilator: someone who absorbs another culture into their own, erasing any difference - like missionaries, or Marxists, or colonists.

2. The Profiteer: someone who is only interested in elsewhere for reasons of exploitation and trade - like merchants or people in the travel business.

3. The Tourist: someone who travels for the pure experience offered by their destination - like the individual on a packaged tour who sits on the air conditioned coach and only leaves it because they can take a better photograph of the view.

4. The Impressionist: someone who seeks a heighten sensibility or intuition from travel, who takes pleasure in difference - like the grand tourists of the 18th and 19th century.

5. The Assimilated: unlike the assimilator, this is someone who penetrates a culture and adopts it for themselves - like immigrants or ex-pats who have 'gone native'.

6. The Exote: someone who revels in the exotic, keeping their distance whilst being seduced by it - like those Westerners fascinated by Eastern religion who come back talking of chakras and reincarnation.

7. The Exile: someone who lives in a foreign land and uses their location as the basis for their work - like the writer who is a smart outsider and finds inspiration in distance, detachment and nostalgia.

8. The Allegorist: someone who travels to form a judgement of their own culture, not of the foreign place - like the American who comes to Europe to say how awful the US is, or the European who goes to America and says the same.

9. The Philosophical Voyager: someone who travels and explores differences but sees through those differences to detect universal features of humankind - like the Enlightenment museum curator or syncretist of world religion.

10. (This is actually Baudrillard's) The Pure Vector: someone who travels but to no particular place - like the business person who spends their whole life in airports and hotels that are identical regardless of country.

Long an admirer of Andrew Brown's sharp, smart journalist prose, his memoir Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared did not disappoint. It matters not if you care not about fishing or Sweden. These two themes, alongside the people he meets and the journeys he makes, become the means for conveying a gripping exploration of disorientating loss and amazement at life.

On cold Swedish mornings: 'It was a world that would only react with endless slowness, although I could still move at normal speed, so that everything had to be fumbled through time and time again and nothing I did seemed to make the shadow of a difference.'

On the joy of fishing well: 'I fished for two hours in a waking trance. There is a moment in every fly cast where your hand has stopped, the rod has straightened. It is a kind of judgement on all the preceding moments. If they have been performed exactly right, then the line will be drawn in a loop unrolling above the water for twenty metres or more until it settles almost gently, and the fly itself whips over the tip of the line and wobbles on to the water like a leaf. It hardly ever happens like that, but that evening almost every cast straightened exactly as I wanted it to: I felt that I knew where each fish would rise next. Sometimes, when I hooked one, I would laugh out loud.'

On the great outdoors: 'In that vast silence, not oppressive, but inescapable, everything I could see felt alien to human concerns. A human being made no more difference than a midge. We might be happy for a while here, but we could never belong, and in the cool shadows of the forest there is almost always a sense that whatever elusive spirit does belong there wishes us no good.'

On the vanity of the journalist: 'It takes time as well as effort to reduce all you want to say to the little you have to say, and working journalists certainly don't have the time. When I fell from those standards... it was into the mannered cleverness of the magazines I read, where the important news they had to bring, and keep bringing, was that the writers were smarter than the people they wrote about. Condescension was the breath of life to me.'

As part of taking part in the Ways with Words Dartington book festival this week, I'm doing a series of Pause for Thoughts on BBC Devon. Each is based on one of our books from The Art of Living series. This morning, Wellbeing by Mark Vernon.

My grandmother was a wise women, often when she didn’t know it.

I recall her once telling me how shocked she was that people today go on so much about wanting to be happy. ‘In my day, we never thought about our happiness,’ she said. ‘And do you know? We were quite happy.’

The thought was wise since if you asked any of the great philosophers on happiness, they would have agreed with her. The Victorian British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, put it this way: ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.’

His point is that happiness is a by-product of a life lived well. It cannot be gained by going for it head-on.

Instead of focussing on your happiness, you should focus on how you are living your life. For him that meant doing things not because they might make you happy, but because they have meaning and purpose in their own right. Happiness came to Mill, but only by the way.

Just what he meant can be seen in this way. Image deciding you were going to become happier by making some new friends. You didn’t really mind who those people might be, so long as they made you laugh or kept you interested. And then imagine what these new friends would think if they knew. It is not them that you care about, but your happiness. They have become little more than happiness service-providers.

This is the how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people approach to life. It is too calculating. And yet today it would seem to be the norm. Type ‘how to be happy’ into Google and you get several million hits. That’s a lot of advice and nearly all of it takes the mistaken, direct approach.

I suspect that is why so much of it sounds so trite: work less, say thanks, keep fit, make friends. If it were that easy, then surely we’d all be happy by now.

That we are not, is I suspect because we’ve forgotten the lesson of the philosophers, and my grandmother. In fact, we might actually do better to stop asking about our happiness altogether. Paradoxical as it seems to say, it might make us a lot happier.

As part of taking part in the Ways with Words Dartington book festival this week, I'm doing a series of Pause for Thoughts on BBC Devon. Each is based on one of our books from The Art of Living series. This morning, Deception by Ziyad Marar.

I can remember the first time I lied to my parents. I suppose I was about 5, and I had stolen something. I knew I’d done it. My mother knew I’d done it. And yet, I swore blind that I had not. I’m not quite sure who was more shocked at the deception, myself or my mother.

We all know that deceiving others is wrong, right? But blatant lies are the easy cases.

The difficult ones are those that seem justified. We sometimes call them ‘white lies’. Or we think there are trivial deceptions, like calling in sick from work. And there are also occasions when it is actually right to deceive.

Think of the times when you haven’t been quite honest with a friend. They might have introduced you to a new boy- or girlfriend and to be honest you didn’t really like them. Or their children might have been down-right annoying, but you didn’t dare say so. Somehow you sensed your friendship couldn’t take it, or the timing was not quite right.

It was probably a good thing to hold back from the truth. As Ziyad Marar explains in his new book, Deception, it is hard to be truly honest all of the time. In fact, such a life would probably be one without many friends at all.

What of the cases when it is right not just to hold back but actually to deceive? The classic example that philosophers think of is what you would say to the Nazi officer who came to call when you had Anne Frank in your attic. Obviously, you would lie to protect her. Or at least you hope you would be brave enough to do so.

The reason why such a deception is right is not just that it saves a life. It is also a deception in which we are not deceiving ourselves. We know exactly what is at stake.

That, then, points to the risk with white lies. We are not only deceiving our friends but we might be deceiving ourselves too. ‘Our useful deceptions are costly,’ writes Marar.

For if we are not careful, and with the best will in the world, self-deception can become a way of life.

A couple of bits of journalism that might be of interest.

I've a piece on the Guardian's Comment is free looking at what the Templeton fund has achieved for religion through science, via the thoughts of three Templeton Prize winners.

And I've a piece on the BBC Magazine website on being gay and having been an Anglican priest, and saying thank who or whatever you thank for Gene Robinson who might well save many gay people years of agony.

As part of taking part in the Ways with Words Dartington book festival this week, I'm doing a series of Pause for Thoughts on BBC Devon. Each is based on one of our books from The Art of Living series. This morning, lllness by Havi Carel.

Havi Carel is an academic, a philosopher at UWE, Bristol. She was drawn to her subject because it seemed to have much to say about life. It is fitting, then, that her philosophy is now helping her to cope with her serious lung condition.

Two years ago Havi was diagnosed with a degenerative lung disease called LAM. It is a serious illness and one of the rarest diseases known to mankind.

She writes about her experience and how philosophy helped her cope in her new book, Illness. It is an important book because part of what she wants to say is that the way we talk about illness today is inappropriate and misleading. Illness is not just a biological dysfunction. Rather, when you are ill, you are called upon to cope with a host of changes, physical, emotional and social. Sometimes you become an outsider to the world of the healthy, an offensive reminder of the underbelly of life.

Illness is a life-changing experience. It changes your relationship to your body. Once the source of so much pleasure and sensual experience, your body becomes a source of pain.

Illness also changes our relationship to ourselves, our plans and desires, the future we imagined we would have. ‘My future has folded in on itself. It has exposed itself to me,’ Havi Carel writes. That is frightening. But it can also be used as a tool for change, for deeper self-understanding.

After all, life is finite. The only difference is that people who know they are ill have a keener sense of their mortality.

In some ways, they live the way that all of us should. They ask questions that everyone would if they dared. How can I make sense of a limited life? Can such a life still be a good one? In what ways can I live well, within the constraints of illness?

Havi Carel has discovered that there can be health within illness, joy within difficulties, and freedom within disability. With the aid of philosophy she has also found positive ways of living with illness.

Her condition is rare. But doesn’t her discovery of health, joy and freedom sound a bit like what everyone would want from life?

As part of taking part in the Ways with Words Dartington book festival this week, I'm doing a series of Pause for Thoughts on BBC Devon. Each is based on one of our books from The Art of Living series. This morning, Clothes by John Harvey.

An odd news story caught my eye. It concerned the clothing of an American religious sect.

The sect hit the headlines in June when its members regained custody of 463 of their children who had been taken away by the state. Television pictures showed the women of the Yearning for Zion ranch walking up the US courtroom steps. What was striking was what they were wearing. They were clothes that had what might be called the ‘prairie look’: big hair, long dresses, straight lines, pastel shades.

To my eye, the garments looked dreary. But now, as a result of their media exposure and through the wonders of consumerism, the sect is selling its clothes online to the public. There is a market for the prairie look.

Whether or not they would appeal to you, the story reminded me of just how important clothes are to our sense of self. As John Harvey explains in his new book, Clothes, what you choose to wear each morning is an important matter.

It might be a pair of old jeans, a smart power-dressing suit, or the latest haute couture creation. Even to say you don’t care what you wear is to make a statement. Clothes reflect our individuality, wealth, status – or the individuality, wealth and status we would like people to think we have.

Or think of the anxiety that can be caused when trying to decide what to wear on ‘dress down Fridays’. These are days when office workers don’t have to put on a grey suit and plain tie, but can go to work in their casual clothing. But what should you wear?

I have friends who spend far longer choosing how to dress on ‘dress down Fridays’ than they do any other day of the week. Suddenly they feel exposed. What will their choice of clothing reveal about them to their colleagues? As John Harvey says: we hesitate before exposing our private self to the public gaze. Choosing the wrong clothes can be as embarrassing as wearing your heart on your sleeve.

So this morning, chose carefully, chose well.

As part of taking part in the Ways with Words Dartington book festival this week, I'm doing a series of Pause for Thoughts on BBC Devon. Each is based on one of our books from The Art of Living series. This morning, Hunger by Raymond Tallis.

I have never understood people who do not eat breakfast. For me, it is one of the blessings of the day. And what a joy: it comes regular as clockwork every morning!

The night might have been short or long, but there is always the thought of tea, then cereal, then coffee to greet me. The tastes are simple. As is the pleasure. But why anyone would want to deny themselves by skipping breakfast is a mystery to me?

Breakfast meets certain biological needs. First thing in the morning, our blood sugar level is low. This is no doubt why sweet pastries are common breakfast fare. Tea and coffee perform a similar trick as an alternative physiological stimulus.

But as Raymond Tallis points out in his new book, Hunger, all human hungers carry meaning too. For example, breakfast is also a ritual. However you prefer to start the day, it doesn’t start quite right if breakfast isn’t quite right. Think of the time you stayed somewhere where they served a so-called continental breakfast. At first, processed cheese and low fat yoghurt might seem exotic. But somehow they do not hit the spot, especially when you had been hoping for bacon and eggs.

The point is that we humans don’t just eat food to quell our appetite. For those of us on this planet who have enough to eat, eating is mostly not just a question of satisfying our hunger. We prefer it to be pleasurable – a culinary delight.

We also like to do it together. As Raymond Tallis explains, the word company is derived from the Latin words meaning bread and together – panis and com: ‘companis’ - company.

Hence we have wedding feasts, romantic suppers, birthday parties, celebratory dinners.

Even breakfast can be a celebration. The word itself is an amalgam of two words, ‘break’ and ‘fast’, and carries religious associations. As the first meal of the day, it was the moment when monks broke their overnight fast. Renewed by the night, with its long hours of prayer, they could start the day afresh.

So today, enjoy your breakfast. And if you normally skip it, well, give yourself a treat.

So, I email Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the phenomenally successful book, The Black Swan. Its thesis is that almost all consequential events in history come from unexpected directions. The implication is that pretty much anything you hear, believe or hope about the future is wrong. We know nothing.

I think this sounds a little Socratic. After all, the gadfly of Athens went around saying the more he learnt the more he realised he knew nothing. His definition of wisdom was not based on how much you know but on how well you understand how little you know. Plus, he was killed for pointing that out to those who thought they knew a lot - a downside, though the upside is that he did leave a legacy which defined a civilisation.

He didn't convey his insights via probability, Taleb's modus operandi, though he did have a kind of inner voice that told him what not to do, the negativity of which seems a little black swanish to me. He also believed that philosophy springs from experience not ideas, which sounds a little like Taleb's notion of tinkering too.

True, Taleb deploys Plato's name for one of his bête noires, namely Platonicity: 'the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.' But he probably can't be blamed for the association since most academic philosophers talk as if Plato was a Platonist and loved triangles more than he loved life.

So I email, to enthuse about Socrates. After all, as far as I can see, Socrates doesn't feature in The Black Swan. Maybe my email will be a revelation.

Within an hour, Taleb gets back:

He is the main character in my next book. Ciao, NNT

Is this some kind of scoop, I wonder...

Last night, we went to see The Year of Magical Thinking, the stage play starring Vanessa Redgrave based upon the memoir by Joan Didion. It concerns the deaths, within a few months, of her husband and then her daughter. It is not for the faint-hearted.

(In fact, during the performance several people left, I wondered whether overwhelmed. Someone else almost stopped Redgrave's monologue with a massive snore: if I was a Freudian, I would guess that the culprit was himself grieving, his falling asleep and then snort being a subconscious attempt to block out and then interrupt the play.)

The Didion character dwells on the horrid abruptness of death, even when expected. On how you imagine you know how you might be affected, but actually you do not. For example, you suspect you will feel crazy for a while but you have no idea that you will do truly crazy things, like not throwing out his shoes because he will need them when he comes back.

The reference to magical thinking refers to the anthropological observation that tribes perform certain rituals, according to strict rules, in the hope of averting or reversing fate. Modern people presume they are above magical thinking. In fact, Didion prides herself on being able to cope, on doing the right thing, on managing his and her posthumous affairs. Until she realises that coping and managing are her magical thinking: she performs the rituals and adheres to the rules that the modern world requires believing it will bring him and her back.

I was reminded of Montaigne's essay, Of Friendship, when he reflects on the untimely death of his soulmate, Étienne de La Boétie.

Since that day when I lost him, I merely drag wearily on. The very pleasures which are proffered me do not console me: they redouble my sorrow at his loss. In everything we were halves: I feel I am stealing his share from him. Nor is it right for me to enjoy pleasures, I decided, while he who shared things with me is absent from me. I was already used and accustomed to being, in everything, one of two, that I now feel I am no more than a half. There is no deed nor thought in which I do not miss him.

That sense of stealing a share from the one who has died comes across in Didion's need to be alone: she can't risk enjoying being with other friends since that would be a betrayal, like forcing someone to stay at home while you go off to a party. And notice Montaigne's use of the phrase 'while he who shared things with me is absent from me'. The 'while' implies La Boétie will return, with the implication that if only he holds off enjoying things, that will cause the return. That's the craziness theme coming through.

Then there is the blunt experience of being 'no more than half'. Of course, unlike cakes, this is something human beings simply cannot be.

That is the truly harrowing moment in Montaigne's essay. And even though the play is on one of the big stages at the National, and it is a one woman show, Redgrave's performance has moments when it touches the void. 'I need him!', Didion finally and simply yells out, after all the subtleties of her analysis.

That said, I also found it intellectually fascinating as a study of human loss, of how we are connected to others, and how they are part of us. Aristotle referred to that as the consciousness that the loved one is 'another self': you can't know yourself, he said, unless you know another, which comes with the even more tricky corollary that you can't know yourself unless you are known by another.

It does seem to be the case that post-Enlightenment science and culture has little idea of this interdependence. Often, it positively disbelieves it, which is no doubt why death is an awkward subject, if not taboo. I think I have little idea of it, the glimpse I have being prompted by the experience of loss following the early death of my mother. The same seems to have been true of Montaigne too, he being an early modern figure and only understanding the fulness of his link with La Boétie when his soulmate died: it is a sign of the times that the essay Of Friendship is at one and the same time an essay Of Death.

This raises something else about death that is perhaps surprising: how life takes courage. You might be conscious that those closest to you will die, and so try to make your living together a manifestation of joyful connectedness while it lasts. But it is easier to be haunted by the future separation of death, with the result that you hold back from togetherness for fear of what it portends.

However, there is hope in this - demonstrated by the sense that The Year of Magical Thinking is in fact life affirming. I felt I had been with something real. As the grieving sometimes say, even as they suffer: they know they are alive. And that is good.

Damon Young, author of Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, writes of the tension between the demands of parenthood and finding time to write, in The Age.

The childless might think that the problem is that kids are a distraction. But Damon pushes the notion of distraction a little further:

Distraction is a failure to give worthwhile things our time, energy and attention.

The truth is that distractions are always with us. Most, like say aimlessly browsing blogs, are without a point: they are mere distractions. However, if kids are distractions, they are never without a point. They are a meaningful distraction that can actually distract you from mere distraction, and be a prompt to put more attention, energy and time into what's important.

Thus Damon concludes, that far from being in opposition, his writing and his son have become part and parcel of the same vocation:

To take up my pen with sincerity is to defend him, and the sort of world I'd like for him.

I have long found this thought of William James inspiring:

Knowledge we could never attain, remaining what we are, may be attainable in consequences of higher powers and a higher life, which we may morally achieve.

The philosopher's very reason for pursuing the good in life. However, I haven't been able to find the original source, taking it here from Huxley's smorgasbord The Perennial Philosophy.

Anyone, any ideas?

Here’s an hypothesis. The energy which fires the new-style militant atheism comes far more from the biological rather than the physical sciences.

The obvious case in point would be Richard Dawkins. He certainly addresses the arguments from modern physics that some use to support theistic beliefs – fine-tuning, and so on. But he is more successful when he rests his case on the science of evolution. Similarly, whilst Dawkins makes TV programmes that launch full scale attacks on religion, with titles like ‘The Root of All Evil?’, cosmologists like Martin Rees make programmes with more modest titles, like ‘What We Still Don’t Know’. Moreover, Rees is quite content to entertain the probability that there are questions science can only fumble over, and never find an answer. It is hard to imagine Dawkins calling his agent burning with passion for a new book entitled ‘The Science Delusion’.

The theologian Paul Tillich is reported to have said that only physicists use the world ‘God’ without embarrassment. Alternatively, the theologian and philosopher Keith Ward told me that he is now receiving invitations to talk to university physics departments as a theologian. Moreover, they listen not just respectfully but with genuine interest.

Or there is the towering figure of Albert Einstein. He was quite happy to talk about ‘God’, though the exact nature of his religiosity is continually contested. Dawkins himself has said he regrets that Einstein used the G-word. And when earlier this year, a letter by Einstein came up for auction, in which he called God the ‘product of human weakness’, Dawkins was disappointed to have been out-bidden. It fetched £170,000.

However, Walter Isaacson, in his recent and excellent biography of Einstein, concludes that he was religiously-minded and probably an agnostic. Moreover, he believed that science was not possible without a religious sensibility. Einstein wrote:

Behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

He concluded:

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.

And on the question of atheism, he averred:

What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.

Now, there are exceptions that question my observation, of course. Robert Winston checks the boxes of both biologist and religious, being a well-known fertility scientist and practising Jew. He has talked of the similarities between science and religion because both talk the language of uncertainty. Alternatively, there is Steven Weinberg, an atheist and cosmologist. He can certainly pen a good line against religion. Having said that, in a now infamous review of ‘The God Delusion’ in the TLS, even he began by noting:

Of all the scientific discoveries that have disturbed the religious mind, none has had the impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. No advance in physics or even cosmology has produced such a shock.

Why? There are no doubt political reasons behind the biological nature of contemporary anti-religious zeal. The spread of Intelligent Design would be one, though that would be limited to America.

More philosophically, there could be reasons that stem from the differences between the sciences. Maybe physicists are more inclined to theistic interpretations, or at least less averse to them, because they deal with fundamental laws of nature. Like the notion of God, they value philosophical simplicity. Or perhaps the very simplicity of the laws raises the question of why the universe obeys identifiable laws in the first place, and how those laws are embedded in it.

Biologists, on the other hand, deal with the complexities of the natural world. Darwin has described a mechanism that accounts for such complexity. It renders old-style, Paley-like arguments about a divine designer redundant. So perhaps for this reason, biologists are more inclined to champion strictly mechanist explanations and reject those that appear to make the world more fuzzy.

Alternatively, biology in the 20th century has been very successful because it has stuck with strictly materialist and mechanistic explanations, as physics did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now, though, the limitations of such an approach in biology are beginning to appear, as they did in physics with the birth of quantum mechanics. Hence we see the development of disciplines like systems biology and interest in evolutionary convergence.

If right, the implication of that would be that the biological nature of vocal atheistic science could turn out to be more of a high watermark than sign of a decisive victory of that reading of science over any other.

A generation of Internet users who have never known a world where you can't surf on-line may be growing up with a different and potentially dangerous view of the world and their own identity, according to a warning delivered to the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, reports Medical News Today.

Dr Himanshu Tyagi said:

This is the age group involved with the Bridgend suicides and what many of these young people had in common was their use of Internet to communicate. It's a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don't like it and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable. People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating, potentially leading to more extreme behaviour to get that sense.

Personally, I'm wary of any easy link between modern media and incidents like the Bridgend suicides, as discussed here. On the other hand, Tyagi, a psychiatrist at the West London Mental Health Trust, is no luddite: he understands the benefits of social networking. He founded an online professional network with more than 60,000 subscribers.

His worry is that a generation is now growing up who see the virtual world more vividly than the real one. To quote Baudrillard, these are people for whom, 'The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.'

In short, Tyagi recognises the ambivalences of what we've said here before: screens screen. He continues:

(The online world creates) an altered perception, a dream-like state, an unnatural blending of their mind with the other person - something that rarely happens in real life. The new generation raised alongside internet is attaching an entirely different meaning to friendship and relations, something we are largely failing to notice.

So now, back to real life!

Although books from The Art of Living series won't be in the shops until September, we are launching early at the Ways With Words Dartington Festival, with a day of events, on five of the titles, on July 15.

I will be speaking on Wellbeing

Ziyad Marar will be speaking on Deception.

Ray Tallis will be speaking on Hunger.

Havi Carel will be speaking on Illness.

And John Harvey will be speaking on Clothes.

Buy tickets!

There was a lot of talk about the competitive element in the women's Wimbledon final today. How could sisters, Venus and Serena Williams, drum it up?

But the discussion was all based on the premise that the point of the competition in a tennis match is to drive an individual to win it. Maybe that is not quite right. Perhaps competition serves to drive players to greater aesthetic heights, hitting more beautiful, fantastic shots. Winning points is a by-product.

It is for this reason that I hope the art of Roger Federer wins over the brawn of Rafael Nadal tomorrow. It'd be a triumph for the competition of greatness over that of the marketplace.

It is so worth reading the first, and arguably greatest, generation of quantum physicists. They were not just geniuses of science but aficionados of philosophy too.

'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.' Max Planck

'It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.' Werner Heisenberg

'An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish.' Erwin Schrodinger

Of course, there was the bomb that came out of their work, a dubious idea. But perhaps a revived philosophical sensibility could do much for physics, and science, today.